(Via the mobile-society@groups.l.google.com mailinglist) The SFGate has an article dated February 27, 2006 about the impact of the mobile phone. The somewhat over the top title of the article is “The world’s a cell-phone stage: The device is upending social rules and creating a new culture”. Of course the article goes on in using the usual terms like: “revolutionary”, “seismic cultural shift”, “new realms”, “upending existing social rules and creating a new culture “, etc. Some brief comments by Howard Rheingold and Paul Levinson. Last alinea kinda interesting: Your phone is you The negative perceptions about bad cell phone use […] Read More
We have probably seen this example of a USB stick that swells up when full, and deflates when empty. (source: www.smallsurfaces.com) Although this is a mockup that apparently has been going around for quite a while, I do think these sort of designs are interesting examples how interaction with technology can be made more intuitive. This phone made by Samsung is real: ? (source: www.mobilecowboys.nl) It’s screen displays a water level that corresponds to the level of ‘juice’ left in the battery. From www.slashphone.com: NTT DoCoMo in Japan just started selling the N702is 3G cell phone to its subscribers. The […] Read More
(Via Mobile Cowboys) British site www.modyourmob.co.uk is dedicated to modding the phone. Modding the phone in moderate ways already happens quite often, I think, as a means of personalize your phone. But now telcom operator Orange has stepped into it and gives away prizes to the best mods. Interestingly btw how the site at more than one place speaks about how this modding supposedly is “big in Japan and it’s going to be massive over here”. This sounds more like a strategy to encourage people to get into it, since we al now Japan is the furthest of al countries […] Read More
Textuality.org reports that many of the English(?) office workers have an infatuation for hightech mini-gadgetry such as mobile phones, Blackberry’s, iPods. They are dubbed G.O.S.S.I.P.S – Gadget Obsessed, Status Symbol Infatuated Professionals. The research was done for recruitment firm Office Angels. From the Reuters press release: LONDON (Reuters) – An iPod and 2 mobile phones are the latest must-have accessories along with Sushi for the status-conscious office worker, according to a survey released on Wednesday. The poll, conducted for recruitment firm Office Angels, found 67 percent of 1,500 respondents considered so-called “micro-gadgets” like Blackberrys, laptop memory sticks and small mobile […] Read More
The world’s first open source cellphone Qtopia GreenphoneTM has been released. The phone runs on Qtopia, a specially crafted lightweight operating system based on Linux. Apart from offering a complete mobile software developers kit (SDK) to developers that wish to create their own applications on this mobile platforms, the phone itself has many specifications that make it comparable to a modern smartphone. Maker of the phone is Trolltech, a Norwegian company well known for it’s QT toolkit which forms the basis for the widely used KDE desktop running on all kinds of open source systems, notably Linux. I think this […] Read More
OK, so I got a new UMTS enabled phone, a Nokia 6233. I got a Dutch T-mobile flat rate internet subscription for € 9,50 a month over GPRS (not as fast as UMTS of course but definitely cheaper). Now I want to use my MacIntosh powerbook running OS X 10.4.7 to go online via my mobile phone over a bluetooth connection. T-Mobile states on its website that using GPRS to connect an Apple to the internet is not possible/supported, but I found out how ;-). First set up internet access on your phone: 1) On my Nokia, you can set […] Read More
(From www.bright.nl.) If you’ re in dire need of someone to call you to save you from a boring obligatory drink with colleagues, or to impress your company, here is the Popularity dialer. Via the website you can subscribe to make a call at a certain time of choice. Escapism through the mobile phone! Now let’s hope you have internet on your mobile phone to quickly subscribe in the toilet when you are in a café with boring people…
kablog-j2me 2.0.8 for Nokia6233 Let’s see if this will work as smoothly as the last post. —– —– [edit: had to edit the image width and height to fit the space] [edit2: I can live with a little self-advertising by the software that goes along with publishing a picture]
A couple of days ago i bought a new UMTS-enabled phone, finally :-). It’s a Nokia 6233. So now i’ll be able to publish from anywhere, thanks to this app i found, called Kablog.
According to a yearly recurring research by Dutch consultancy bureau CheckItOut (a Newcom branch), teenagers as well are annoyed by people talking too loud in their mobile phone, or having stupid ringtones. 47 % thinks loud conversations are a nuisance 46 % dislikes irritating ringtones 38 % doesn’t want to listen in on other people’s conversations The poll was held among 585 young people between 12 – 25 years. ———– ———– Among the total Dutch population, the numbers are even higher, according to the Telecom monitor 2006 (source www.nu.nl): 62 % is annoyed by loud conversations 60 % hates listening […] Read More
source: EU website The European Commission has started a public consultation about the issue of child safety and the use of the mobile phone. The consultation is undertaken within the framework of the “Safer Internet” programme. A “Public consultation document” (PDF file, 142.2 KB) has been released that describes the issue. In short, the EU sees the following risks: 1) “Exposure to illegal or inappropriate content” – Children may be exposed to unwanted or illegal content via the mobile phone. 2) “Ease of contact by predators, bullying” – Children may be prone to harassment via the mobile phone. 3) “Risk […] Read More
Thursday, June 29 Esther Polak in cooperation with Virtueel platform has organized the workshop Mobile Habits about mapping and mobility in the Balie in Amsterdam. Since I work together with Esther and Ab in the Fulani project, I attended. About 25 artists, designers and scientists showed up, which turned out to be a very inspiring mix of people. Overall the most surprising and stimulating of the whole day in my opinion was that all more or less spoke the same language. Apart from a couple of interesting talks by Esther Polak and Christian Nold, Hanne Kirstine Adriansen and Ab Drent, […] Read More
This Friday, Mylene and I did a bit of a crazy thing and drove over 200 kilometers east to Essen and back again at the same evening to see the Visual Power Show. It was held in a former industrial complex called Zollverein, in the cole-washer to be exactly. They are transforming many old factories in the Ruhr-area into ‘creative zones’ now as a way to preserve them. It was tamed wildness: you couldn’t wander around and explore the building or the terrain. Finding the venue turned out to be a real pain: first we drove the wrong way to […] Read More
Friday June 17 I chaired a session which I had organized about the theme of ‘social inclusion’ during the second Holland Open Software Conference. Speakers I had invited were Yuwei Lin (researcher Manchester Univ.), Soenke Zehle (teacher at Saarland Univ.), Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (UNU-Merit – Maastricht Univ.), and Arjan de Jager (IICD). Below an impression from the session: Rishab thinks the term social inclusion does not cover the point, i.e. F/OSS main opportunity lies in the fact that it is software that can be used to learn from. Rishab stated it is not only access that matters but also skills […] Read More
Last week, Saturday June 18 I was at the “Old curtains, new screens” conference, organized by our colleagues from the NWO-TKC project. The conference was mainly about the use of internet for/by minority groups in eastern Europe. One of the more interesting talks was by Aniko Imre. She discussed ludic aspects in a Hungarian anime-film, translated as The District. Some ludic aspects that were brought forward are: the medium (an anime, which is normally connected to children’s entertainment), ludic use of techniques (weird flat bodies with natural-looking heads based on photographs of real people), playing with identities through language-use, confirmation […] Read More
Yes yes, still here.. after finally moving to my own apartment in the east of Amsterdam and becoming responsible for my own dirty dishes, and after finishing Sources of the Self, the magnum opus by Charles Taylor’s (yes, the Liberian dictator-philosopher 😉 it’s time for a little update on what I’ve been up to lately: Writing on my paper about mobile communication as gift culture. Unfortunately it was turned of for the book by Katz, Ling and Campbell. Reading: i.a. Taylor, and a lot of literature on mobile communication. Succeeded in getting the NWO grant for the art/science project. Really […] Read More
Not too long ago I posted these cool designs for mobile phones that make you think about their use in public space. Now here is another line of (humorous) products that make you think about the uses of mobile phones: Tru:th – a phone with a build-in alcohol promilage meter you can only use when drunk and are more likely to tell the truth Rosary – a phone that portrays religious icons, so you can pray to them on-the-go Phish – a phone that makes the water in your fish bowl raise by one degree every minute, so keep it […] Read More
Thursday, 30 March 2006, V2_ in Rotterdam hosted an evening on internet use in China. The Great Leap has become a popular metaphor to describe China’s turbulent and fast-paced economic modernization process. Many Chinese citizens have seen their private freedoms increase significantly but official policies of ‘opening up’ have neither changed the political system nor the state control of public media. TANGENT_LEAP brings together a group of experts and activists using bottom-up media such as the web, e-mail, blogs and sms as forms of self-organization to create an emergent middle landscape, somewhere between the official media rhetoric, and the private […] Read More
Funny, yesterday I discussed my preliminary paper on mobile communication as gift-culture (following the well-known anthropological classic by Marcel Mauss) together with my colleague PhD students. At one point we were talking about the consequences of this gift-exchange view, whether this would mean that people not in the gift-circle (have-nots or want-nots) would be left out of the circle. I said yes, definitely. And here’s a post on textuality.org that seems to confirm this: According to a new study, the new social outcasts are teenagers and young adults without mobile phones. The ;The Sydney Morning Herald; reports. Mobile phones are […] Read More
Everyone knows mobile phones can be irritating as hell to others, especially in public places. But as soon as we ourselves are calling, we don’t care so much any longer about others near us, do we…? SoMo is a cool & funny design project that questions our behaviour in public spaces, and gives us some sanctions to ‘enlighten’ others. 5 Different mobile phones have been designed: – SoMo1 is the electric shock mobile. – SoMo2 is the speaking mobile. – SoMo3 is the musical mobile. – SoMo4 is the knocking mobile. – SoMo5 is the catapult mobile. ==update: link to […] Read More